Gary Marcus thinks that symbol-manipulation is critical for causality. In biology, in a complex creature such as a human, one finds many different brain areas. Expecting a monolithic architecture to replicate that seems to Gary Marcus deeply unrealistic. Yoshua Bengio believes that sequential reasoning can be performed while staying in a deep learning framework which makes use of attention mechanisms and the injection of new modularity and training framework (e.g. Bringing causality, in something like the rich form in which it is expressed in humans, into deep learning, would be a real and lasting contribution to general artificial intelligence.

Yoshua Bengio is recognized as one of the world's leading experts in artificial intelligence and a pioneer in deep learning. Yoshua Bengio's profound influence on the evolution of our society is undeniable. In 2017, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2018, he was is the computer scientist who collected the largest number of new citations in the world. In 2019, he received, jointly with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, the ACM A.M. Turing Award -- "the Nobel Prize of Computing" -- for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs.